


Good Christian Pillowtalk

by nuricurry



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Catholic Guilt, Crisis of Faith, Existential Angst, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Religious Discussion, some liberties taken with Leon's background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-04 01:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17294792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: Leon Kennedy always seemed to want to talk about God.





	Good Christian Pillowtalk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gravy_tape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/gifts).



> For my boo Junior, as always.

She was straddling him naked the first time she heard him talk about God. She didn’t know what about the situation spurned the topic; they both smelled like dirt and chemically treated sewer water, and, as previously stated, she was naked-- most men she slept with didn’t tend to think about much beyond that. But, Leon Kennedy was not like most men, in a variety of ways. Leon Kennedy was twenty-one years old and looked like he was seventeen. Leon Kennedy had never grown a beard and Leon Kennedy had narrow shoulders and wide hips. He had a split eyebrow that she didn’t yet know the story of. Leon Kennedy was not ruggedly handsome or rich, or outlandishly smart. He was a small town cop that spoke with an Appalachian accent and who rubbed his nose when he was nervous, and who, for whatever reason, decided to trust his life in Ada Wong’s hands. And, that was before she decided to fuck him.

“I think we’re underneath the church,” Leon said, while his eyes were focused on the top of the sewer above their heads, “Or, maybe close to it. It’s not far from the station. I remember walking to it, the day I turned in my application.”

“Are you a religious man, Leon?” Ada asked, as she shifted her hips, and tried to catch his attention again. Leon’s eyes went wide, and he looked back down, meeting her gaze, and she could see his throat move as he swallowed thickly.

“Uh, sorta. I mean, I used to be,” he stumbled over his words, and Ada believed she must have sufficiently distracted him, but he continued, “I grew up Catholic. Mass every Sunday, Catechism on Wednesday, you know, the whole thing…” he trailed off.

Ada didn’t know. Ada didn’t grow up with any church. Ada didn’t grow up with God. She was quite certain that He didn’t exist. His name was only invoked for emphasis, in the middle of a good fuck or when she was in a lot of pain. She never learned how to pray, and wouldn’t even know where to begin if she were to try.

“I went to confession. I hadn’t gone in years. It was weird,” Leon’s eyes shifted away again, trailing from her face, back to the ceiling above, “I hadn’t done anything worth confessing, but I felt I still had to go anyway. I just talked to the priest. I talked for an hour.”

Ada stopped trying to distract him. It was a fruitless endeavor at that point, and, in spite of herself, her curiosity had gotten the better of her. “What did you tell him?”

Leon didn’t answer at first. He was, for perhaps the first time since she’d met him, completely still and silent. She had just been about to give up-- if he didn’t want to say, she wasn’t going to force him-- when Leon’s mouth opened again.

“I said that I wondered if God still bothered to think about me.” Leon was not looking at her face. His eyes were glued to the damp, slick brick above. “I guess I’ve got my answer now.”

She didn’t say anything in response to that. The words she could offer were far too cheap for the weight of what he just confessed, and unlike that priest, she couldn’t tell him to recite a few Hail Marys and pray to put the thought out of his mind. All she could do was lean forward, and place both of her hands against his cheeks, and draw him up towards her, so that she could seal his lips in a kiss.

* * *

  
Those sorts of conversations, in a strange, ironic way, became their sacrament.

Like all proper lapsed Catholics, who only went to Mass on Christmas and Easter, Leon only saw her when things in his life had thoroughly and utterly gone to shit. They met in Raccoon City because he was caught in a mess bigger than him, and he’d gotten out alive. They met in Spain because he was too helpful, too self sacrificing for his own good (and even if he wasn’t, the United States government wasn’t about to let him tell them the word ‘no’.) Their reunion in the Eastern Slavic Republic was as welcome as it was unexpected; she really hadn’t thought she’d find Leon there, but when things went wrong, that’s where he tended to be, and so she settled herself right in beside him, just the same as she always did.

She didn’t know the differences between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. She knew their crosses looked different, she knew their priests whore different robes, but that was about all she knew, because for as little as she knew about the Christian God, she knew even less about the nuances of His countless followers.

She learned a little of the differences, after they left the ESR; she found Leon in Rome, drunk on wine and self-hatred, slumped over in the back pew of a church near the Trevi. He was wet, and told her that he had actually just gotten dragged out of aforementioned fountain, so she took it upon herself to carry him back to his hotel room (which legally she could call a closet) and tossed him down onto the narrow bed.

“I suppose at least this time it was better that you feel in a clean fountain, and not some sewer under a pharmaceutical plant,” she said, as she stripped off her damp shirt, and hung it over the back of the singular chair.

“...God from God, Light from Light…”

She knew he was drunk. He had loudly stated as much into her ear, as she dragged him through Rome’s busy streets. He had said all manners of strange and incoherent things to her, from questions about her perfume, to admitting his front teeth were fake, having gotten them knocked out when he was nineteen and riding a dirt bike. His voice was still slurred, and he seemed to have forgotten she was in the room at all, but she still didn’t understand what it was he was trying to say.

“...For us and our salvation…”

His voice stopped. His words died, not even leaving any whispers or remnants in the air he’d offered to them. Leon’s eyes were closed, but tears still began to slip out from beneath his closed lids, dampening his dark lashes, and leaving tracks on his sallow and thin face. When her weight shifted the mattress beneath him, Leon rolled over, closer to her, and pressed his face into the gnarled scar that tore across her stomach. Ada let him; she’d long ago recognized his need for closeness as something less physical, even if he never rejected her offerings of sex.

“Are you praying, Leon?” she asked quietly, and received only a single nod in response. “What are you praying for?”

“Forgiveness,” he murmured, cheeks wet and breath hot against her skin, “And salvation.”

Her fingers found the messy strands of his hair. Slowly, she began to comb through it, while her voice maintained that particular soft evenness. “Why do you think that is something God can give you? You saved your own ass in Raccoon City. You’ve been the one keeping yourself alive this whole time. Whether by dumb luck, or an actual decent plan,” she gently teased him, “you were the one saving yourself.”

“Sasha,” was all Leon was able to say, before he choked on regret again, and she felt him sob into her belly.

“I’m sure he’s forgiven you,” she pointed out, “considering the alternatives. And if he hasn’t, then you might as well go to the pope, and see if he can sort him out, for all the good it’ll do you.”

“He doesn’t believe in the pope,” Leon said, and Ada could tell how drunk he was, from the way he shaped his vowels. Ten years of international travel had softened his accent, but when he was drunk it slipped over his tongue again, easy and familiar and so distinctively Leon Kennedy.

“What?” was all she said, because she truly didn’t understand.

“Eastern Orthodox,” Leon clarified, as if that should answer everything. She scratched his head, and that urged him to complete that thought. “They don’t believe in the pope. Or, well, they do. But he’s not the most important, like with Catholics. It’s complicated.” Ada hummed in response. Leon exhaled deeply, and rolled back over onto his back, to tilt his face upwards towards the ceiling. “I told Sasha he had to live, in order to make amends for all the others who died. His atonement is to stop the same thing from happening again in the future.”

Ada looked down at him. “His atonement, or yours?”

Leon’s eyes opened, and immediately found hers. “Mine is punishment.”

It was said so easily, so casually, that one could easily miss the depth hidden in that response. But Ada saw it, because she was trained to see everything. Because she knew Leon Kennedy like she knew her favorite dress, or her pistol. Familiar, well worn, and perhaps always on the verge of breaking down.

“You don’t believe you deserve atonement.” It wasn’t a question. She knew the answer. Leon, aware of that fact, didn’t bother to reply, and only turned over on his side again, only now, with his back to her.

* * *

  
“Do you believe in God?”

She wiped the splatter of blood from her cheek, and glanced down, to where Leon was giving her a set of rudimentary stitches into an ugly gash along the inside of her thigh.

“Is that really something you want to be asking me right now?” she questioned him, and then, shot him a coy smile, “Should you be taking the Lord’s name so close to a woman’s bare vagina?”

Leon was far too used to her crude remarks, her pinpointed teasing. Fifteen years did that to a person, but she still saw color rise to his face, and his long bangs fluttered slightly, as he let out an exasperated huff with a shake of his head. “Nothing God made is profane, so I believe that your...I’m sure it counts.”

Ada laughed. Perhaps naively, she believed that had diverted the discussion, but always, Leon was a dog with a bone, when he had something on his mind. “So, do you believe?”

A unintentionally sharp tug of thread caused her to let out a hiss, and Leon quickly apologized, and went out of his way to demonstrate his effort to be more considerate with his touch, taking his time, and checking on Ada’s mood, as he added another stitch.

“I was never taught to believe,” was what she ultimately decided to say, because she didn’t lack tact, regardless of her loose relationship with it. Leon, for as little faith as he expended into God, clearly still believed in the existence of one, and she wouldn’t tarnish that. To her, God was, at best, a distant concept. People believed in it, but they also believed in Santa Claus and in politicians. She never had any reason to believe in anything that she couldn’t prove. But, Leon was a man of faith, a man who held ideals and hope close to the chest, and she wouldn’t take that away from him.

Frankly, she liked him better that way. It made him different.

“Do you want to?”

She looked at him. Leon, knelt on the ground between her thighs, one leg draped over his shoulder, and his fingers spotted with blood. His shirt had been left in pieces after the plane crash, and there wasn’t any point in trying to salvage it for anything other than makeshift wipes, and so he’d taken it off, and she could now see the expansive mural of scars that littered his chest. The one in his shoulder, the one that had come from their first meeting, was the scar she knew most intimately, the scar she had, mostly in her own head, staked a claim as her own, and she tended to it, with hickeys and kisses and playful reminders that she had left her mark on him a permanent one. It was not the first, nor the last scar he had, but it was the one uniquely hers, the one that would be there, even when she wasn’t.

What was God, other than a belief in something greater? An idea that the world wasn’t pointless, that there was some cosmic force behind everything, that gave the terrible parts of life rationality?

“I want to believe that you know you aren’t as damned as you seem to think, Leon,” she said to him, as she reached out, and brushed her fingers over the rough stubble over his chin, “I want to believe in that.”

Leon was the one who had nothing to say, after that. He only pressed his lips to her finger tips, and resumed his task of closing up her wound, as warbled Latin hymns filtered through the muffled radio.


End file.
